Sintagmas nominales y su contribución a la calidad de explicaciones científicas escritas por estudiantes de 4° grado: hacia la precisión conceptual

Students begin to deploy grammatical resources during middle school for increased conceptual precision. Nominal groups (NG) are a syntactic resource used to specify the entities introduced in the discourse, providing greater lexical density and disciplinary accuracy. Although there has been research on the extension and complexity of NGs in non-disciplinary analytic genres, their contribution to the quality of disciplinary genres has been minimally explored. This study analyzed the NGs used in 243 scientific explanations written by 66 4th graders in four moments of a learning sequence about scientific explanations. The contribution of NGs to the quality of these explanations was also determined. NGs were identified and classified according to their structural composition, and their length and the diversity of NGs in each explanation were calculated. The results show significant differences in all NGs for all moments, with larger effects between moments 1 and 4. The regression models evidenced that, in the first unit, NG diversity and the use of simple NGs were predictors of the quality of the explanations (R² = 0.40), while, for the second unit, NG diversity and the use of extended complex nominal NGs contributed to quality (R² = 0.27), although the latter with a negative coefficient. These results highlight the connections between syntax, genre, and microdevelopmental language trajectories relevant to be considered in instructional proposals for students beginning disciplinary literacy.